- NANOG - lists.nanog.org

Looking for a ping plotting tool for *nix
by dani-post＠roisman.com 01 Dec '01

01 Dec '01

Hey folks. I'm searching for a tool that will continuously (once per second or .5 second) ping every hop on a specified path (or ping a list of hosts) and somehow plot/graph/track packet loss and latency/jitter. Looking for something that can run as a service on Unix, and can do some easy reporting in a tabular or graph form. Thanks for the input. - Dani

6 7

Followup British Telecom outage reason
by Sean Donelan 01 Dec '01

01 Dec '01

BT is telling ISPs the reason for the multi-hour outage was a software bug in the interface cards used in BT's core network. BT installed a new version of the software. When that didn't fix the problem, they fell back to a previous version of the software. BT didn't identify the vendor, but BT is identified as a "Cisco Powered Network(tm)." Non-BT folks believe the problem was with GSR interface cards. I can't independently confirm it.

19 29

a question about the economics of peering
by Alex Rubenstein 01 Dec '01

01 Dec '01

Today, I was approached by *unnamed-ethernet-extension-company*. They extend ethernets between several US and UK peering exchanges. While speaking with them today, thier engineer and I got into a little bit of a disagreement as to why people peer with each other at public exchange points. My belief is that generally speaking, networks meet at public exchange points (such as MAE-*, LINX, AMSIX, AADS, etc) is to exchange traffic with each other more economically (read: save money). His belief is that people will pay a premium to get to an exchange point, because it's worth paying a premium to have 'less hops' between two networks. Essentially, he said that paying more for peering that for transit is typical, and to be expected, and most people accept this. Whats the common opinion on this?

17 20

The Cidr Report
by CIDR Report 01 Dec '01

01 Dec '01

This is an auto-generated mail on Fri Nov 30 23:00:00 PST 2001 It is not checked before it leaves my workstation. However, hopefully you will find this report interesting and will take the time to look through this to see if you can improve the amount of aggregation you perform. Check http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr-report.html for a daily update of this report. NEW: Check http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr-report-region.html for the regional version of this report. NEW: Check http://www.employees.org/~tbates/autnums.html for a complete list of autonomous system number to name mappings as used by the CIDR-Report. The report is split into sections: 0) General Status List the route table history for the last week, list any possibly bogus routes seen and give some status on ASes. 1) Gains by aggregating at the origin AS level This lists the "Top 30" players who if they decided to aggregate their announced classful prefixes at the origin AS level could make a significant difference in the reduction of the current size of the Internet routing table. This calculation does not take into account the inclusion of holes when forming an aggregate so it is possible even larger reduction should be possible. 2) Weekly Delta A summary of the last weeks changes in terms of withdrawn and added routes. Please note that this is only a snapshot but does give some indication of ASes participating in CIDR. Clearly, it is generally a good thing to see a large amont of withdrawls. 3) Interesting aggregates Interesting here means not an aggregate made as a set of classful routes. Thanks to GX Networks for giving me access to their routing tables once a day. Please send any comments about this report directly to CIDR Report <cidr-report(a)cisco.com>. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CIDR REPORT for 30Nov01 0) General Status Table History ------------- Date Prefixes 231101 104388 241101 104158 251101 103973 261101 104689 271101 104073 281101 104130 291101 103988 301101 104104 Check http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr.plot.html for a plot of the table history. Possible Bogus Routes --------------------- AS Summary ---------- Number of ASes in routing system: 12046 Number of ASes announcing only one prefix: 7241 (4108 cidr, 3133 classful) Largest number of cidr routes: 797 announced by AS701 Largest number of classful routes: 1396 announced by AS701 1) Gains by aggregating at the origin AS level --- 30Nov01 --- ASnum NetsNow NetsCIDR NetGain % Gain Description AS1221 1197 921 276 23.1% Telstra Pty Ltd AS4151 319 179 140 43.9% USDA AS16473 198 77 121 61.1% Bell South AS4755 226 142 84 37.2% Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. Autonom AS2048 184 105 79 42.9% State of Louisiana AS1239 483 405 78 16.1% Sprint AS19632 87 11 76 87.4% Metropolis Intercom S.A. AS17557 154 83 71 46.1% Pakistan Telecom AS12302 104 36 68 65.4% MobiFon S.A. AS4200 127 62 65 51.2% Apex Global Information Services, AS2149 351 287 64 18.2% Performance Systems, Inc. AS3464 156 95 61 39.1% Alabama SuperComputer Network AS16758 63 6 57 90.5% IKON Office Solutions AS4323 370 314 56 15.1% Time Warner Communications, Inc. AS3908 303 251 52 17.2% Supernet, Inc. AS17561 115 64 51 44.3% Internet service provision to Wes AS1 513 462 51 9.9% BBN Planet AS209 292 242 50 17.1% Qwest AS376 122 73 49 40.2% Reseau Interordinateurs Scientiqu AS16814 65 18 47 72.3% NSS, S.A. AS11139 92 46 46 50.0% Cable & Wireless Dominica AS15290 240 196 44 18.3% AT&T Canada IES AS10620 64 21 43 67.2% TVCABLE BOGOTA AS10292 72 29 43 59.7% TELECOMMUNICATIONS OF JAMAICA AS5416 51 9 42 82.4% BATELCO-BH AS1267 68 26 42 61.8% Infostrada S.p.A. AS19834 51 11 40 78.4% NetForce, Inc. AS2007 167 129 38 22.8% INFONET AS12235 47 9 38 80.9% Cove Software Systems Inc AS2652 103 67 36 35.0% Government Telecommunications and For the rest of the previous weeks gain information please see http://www.employees.org:80/~tbates/cidr-report.html 2) Weekly Delta Please see http://www.employees.org:80/~tbates/cidr-report.html for this part of the report 3) Interesting aggregates Please see http://www.employees.org:80/~tbates/cidr-report.html for this part of the report

1 0

RE: @Home ordered to shutdown at Midnight
by Sean Donelan 01 Dec '01

01 Dec '01

On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Jim Dixon wrote: > One thing is certain. > If the service still works tomorrow then it can be presumed that the court > order did not state that it must be shut down. Its a game of chicken. But based on how poorly the game was played with Northpoint, I wouldn't be surprised to see at least some of the cable companies like Charter to move to their new network as soon as the contract is ended. The judge said the company and bondholders could negotiate new deals with the cable companies. Cox, AT&T, etc could come to a new arrangement to continue service before Midnight (PST as someone pointed out @Home is a California based company). If they don't come to a new arrangement, the company and creditors can cease service at Midnight. The US Bankruptcy Courty handling this case is http://www.canb.uscourts.gov/ They have a section on the "free" part of the web site on the Excite@Home bankruptcy under "Pending Large Chapter 11 Cases." But there is no information. The fee-based PACER system would have the complete text of the judge's order.

2 1

RE: @Home ordered to shutdown at Midnight
by James Smith 01 Dec '01

01 Dec '01

Interesting to note that even though the govt is all for getting everyone on the "Information Superhigway", no mention is made of any government sponsored plan to prevent the service from going dark. If this were a provider of POTS, and it was dialtone being turned off, would there would be some scrambling by the govt to prevent it? So to make this somewhat on-topic, what will the advance of VOIP do to SLA requirements? Would this be allowed to happen if customers were using an IP provider for access into their VOIP gateway? IP phone at home, VOIP gateway and "Normal" trunks at the exchange point kind of thing. James H. Smith II NNCDS NNCSE Systems Engineer The Presidio Corporation

6 5

Re: a question about the economics of peering
by brandon＠rd.bbc.co.uk 01 Dec '01

01 Dec '01

> where if you peer with the network that has > the congestion and there is no money changing hands there is not > a lot of incentive for them to fix it just for you. I don't see how paying someone to transit to their congested peers network is better than just peering with the congested network yourself. brandon

3 2

RE: a question about the economics of peering
by Hitesh Patel 30 Nov '01

30 Nov '01

IMHO, you have to have 'best blend' of direct peering at peering points as also having dual homing to upstream - ofcourse depending on size. 1.it help keeping resiliency and 2.provide optimal route to your customer - No matter how much fine-tuning you do in attempt to provide optimal path to your customer, in absence of direct peering, some of your customer have to bounce back accross atlantic to reach to network within their own country - not a good 'economics' for your customer and so to you. Also where there is metered base charging by your upstream provider, you end-up paying less to the extent traffic is carried by your peers and vic-e-versa or 3. go for private peerign connection. No congestion :O) The cost of peering has to be viewed from the perspective of complementary to each other and resiliency point of view rather than in absolute 'economics' term. As for congestion, you can't miss it- no matter which alone option you opt ;O) Best Regards Hitesh Patel -----Original Message----- From: brandon(a)rd.bbc.co.uk [mailto:brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk] Sent: 30 November 2001 17:48 To: nanog(a)merit.edu Subject: Re: a question about the economics of peering > where if you peer with the network that has > the congestion and there is no money changing hands there is not > a lot of incentive for them to fix it just for you. I don't see how paying someone to transit to their congested peers network is better than just peering with the congested network yourself. brandon

1 0

RE: a question about the economics of peering
by Lane Patterson 30 Nov '01

30 Nov '01

As Bill Woodcock asserts, there is no question that peering at exchanges is driven by economics more than other advantages such as path minimization or performance maximization, whether you are peering amongst Tier1's or are a Tier2/other minimizing your transit $$$ by maximizing your peering traffic %. But the drop in transit pricing, and things like burstible billing, have definitely changed the "margin" in this calculation. So now we see folks going to exchanges/neutral colocation for much more than just peering arguments, but a combo of: -public peering -private peering -access to lots of low-cost transit providers -access to lots of low-cost circuit providers--including ethernet "local loops" -ease of switching bandwidth suppliers -just need a good facility to put a POP -sell services As for IXen in Europe versus US, the history (having suffered thru this at MAE-East) is that FDDI-based US exchanges reached congestion first, and the largest traffic pushers were forced to go the private peering route. So legacy exchanges then entered a rather spotty period of faltering critical mass, competing exchanges, diverging technology choices (ATM versus Ether) and a mixed private/public interconnection model. Today, congestion is not a problem at US IXen, but having critical public peering mass in all the major geographic peering areas is. Whereas European public exchanges never experienced congestion, since by time traffic growth hit, there were egress-buffered GigE switches available. Thus they continued merrily along toward critical mass, and traffic at exchanges like LINX (surpassed 13 Gbps this week!), AMS-IX, and even Japanese exchanges have surpassed legacy US exchanges. However, new entrants to RIPE and APNIC IX business may certainly pull at the peering concensus in these areas. Cheers, -Lane > -----Original Message----- > From: Giles Heron [mailto:giles@packetexchange.net] > Sent: Friday, November 30, 2001 9:38 AM > To: David R. Dick > Cc: nanog(a)merit.edu > Subject: Re: a question about the economics of peering > > > > "David R. Dick" wrote: > > > > > > > > Today, I was approached by > *unnamed-ethernet-extension-company*. They > > > extend ethernets between several US and UK peering exchanges. > > > > > > While speaking with them today, thier engineer and I got > into a little bit > > > of a disagreement as to why people peer with each other > at public exchange > > > points. My belief is that generally speaking, networks > meet at public > > > exchange points (such as MAE-*, LINX, AMSIX, AADS, etc) > is to exchange > > > traffic with each other more economically (read: save money). > > > > > > His belief is that people will pay a premium to get to an > exchange point, > > > because it's worth paying a premium to have 'less hops' > between two > > > networks. > > > > The problem with this idea is that public exchange points need > > to be *avoided* when they get too congested. People may start > > out trying to minimize number of hops, but I think they eventually > > try to minimize total latency. > > but what if the *unnamed-ethernet-extension-company* wasn't providing > access to public exchange points, but was rather enabling uncongested > private peering over its network? That way latency and hop count are > both mimimised. > > BTW, public IXen in Europe don't tend to be congested. > Whether this is > the result of better management, or of lower traffic volumes, > than IXen > in the US I'm not sure... > > Giles > > > > > > > Essentially, he said that paying more for peering that > for transit is > > > typical, and to be expected, and most people accept this. > > > > > > Whats the common opinion on this? > > > > > > > > > > > -- > ================================================================= > Giles Heron Principal Network Architect PacketExchange Ltd. > ph: +44 7880 506185 "if you build it they will yawn" > ================================================================= >

1 0

cox@home "external statement"
by Todd Suiter 30 Nov '01

30 Nov '01

Got this from a buddy who works at cox in Omaha. "We are still unsure about what this means to our service. We received an update from our folks in the courtroom that E@H asked the judge not to turn us off, but instead reject our MDAs and they will provide interim service for as yet undisclosed terms. The judge agreed. We still believe that it is highly unlikely that we will go dark - we expect E@H to come forward with a proposal today."

1 0